Road crew workers said they’re still reeling from what happened early Thursday morning, when they helped save a baby from a burning vehicle and watched the baby’s mother walk away from the wreckage.
During his overnight shift as a flagger for road work on the Interstate 5 Bridge, Chad Worthington manned the attenuator truck, a vehicle designed to protect road workers by absorbing the impact of a crash.
Worthington said that he saw something in his peripheral vision and glanced at the side-view mirror. He saw a van that had driven about 100 feet into the work zone coming toward him at what he guessed to be 60 mph.
“I leaned my head back to the seat rest and braced for impact,” the 31-year-old Oregon City, Ore., resident said.
The van crashed into the vehicle at about 3:25 a.m. “It’s a good thing we had (the attenuator) because it did its job,” he said.
Worthington said he wasn’t seriously hurt, but he was in shock. He heard screaming and ran toward the van, which had caught fire. A woman, whom he said was driving, was on the ground screaming “my baby, my baby,” he said.
Worthington learned that the driver’s daughter was in the back seat of the vehicle and that her mother was in the passenger seat.
Worthington ran to get his fire extinguisher and was met by other crew members.
Daniel Salazar, 40, of Portland was on the Oregon side of the bridge wrapping up his shift as a flagger when he heard Worthington tell the crew about the crash over the radio. He, too, ran toward the van.
Together, they used several fire extinguishers to try to put out the blaze. In the midst of his efforts, Worthington watched as the woman who had been driving the van walked away.
“She just hopped the jersey barrier and started walking south on the bridge while her baby and her mom are in a burning car,” Worthington said. “She’s seeing me trying to help her kid … it was unreal.”
But with the flames continuing to grow, Salazar and Worthington kept working.
Another crew member got the woman out of the front passenger seat and Salazar and Worthington started breaking the back window to try and get at the baby.
“I’m just thinking, get the baby out, get the little child out,” Worthington said. “Adrenaline kicks in, and you just do what you think needs to happen.”
Salazar used the fire extinguisher to break the back window, and Worthington reached in and unbuckled the child seat. With flames licking the roof of the car, Worthington pulled the baby girl out of the van and handed her to Salazar and they both ran away from the flaming van.
“I don’t know who in their right mind would run away from a burning car with their baby and their mom in it. It’s just mind-boggling to me,” Salazar said. “I’m just glad we got the baby out. I was just so scared and she was in there so long, breathing in all that thick smoke.”
The child was taken to an area hospital for precautionary reasons, Oregon Department of Transportation spokesman Don Hamilton said. Her condition was not available.
A contract worker for Electrical Construction Co. helped with the rescue as well, Hamilton said.
The company’s president, Andrew Beyer, commended his employee, who did not want to be identified, for putting himself in harm’s way to keep others safe.
“That’s what we should all do as citizens of the world,” Beyer said. “I’m proud of them for what they did.”
Officers have not identified the driver but are investigating the crash as a hit-and-run, Portland Police Bureau Sgt. Pete Simpson said.
Heavy traffic
Although the lane closure for the construction was scheduled to last until 5 a.m., the crash kept the lanes closed until about 6:40 a.m.
That delay tied up Clark County roadways throughout the morning, with some motorists reporting hourslong waits in the bumper-to-bumper traffic on both highways and surface streets.
Washington State Department of Transportation spokesman Bart Treece said that a separate crash in Portland likely also affected the clogged roadways.
“It was brutal,” he said. “Having (a crash) happen right before the peak period of the commute can have a lasting effect on the morning drive.”
Butch Gibbons, 55, of Hazel Dell left a client in the Hudson’s Bay area at about 7 a.m. and headed for North Portland. By 10:30 a.m., he had only made it to Eighth and Washington streets, in sight of I-5 but inching along.
Though it’s the worst traffic he’s seen, Gibbons said he wasn’t frustrated. He did some work on his phone while he waited.
“It’s typical,” he said. “You can get all mad about it, but it is what it is.”
While cars sat idling on the roadway in downtown Vancouver, employees at Compass Coffee tried to make the situation a little better. Baristas took to the streets and handed out free 8-ounce cups of cold-brew coffee.
“They’ve been stuck there and that sucks,” Assistant Manager Chelsea Harshaw said. “We might as well brighten someone’s day if we can and people love their coffee.”
